D&D (2024) What happened to proficiency bonus times per day?

[Nikosandros]

I think it was Tasha that introduced the concept of having limited features that can be used a number of times per day equal to the proficiency bonus. This went on for a while, but it seems to me that the idea has been completely dropped for the 2024 revision. Was there ever some discussion from WotC about this?

 

[payn]

 

[James Gasik]

I think it was due to multiclassing- if you go back to an early playtest, the playtest Cleric had this channel divinity style power that had it's uses tied to proficiency bonus per day and scaled based on proficiency bonus- so any character could dip Cleric 1 to get this feature and have it scale for them the same way it did for a full Cleric.

This is fine for racial abilities that are meant to scale in that fashion, but they apparently felt that for class abilities, this might open the door for multiclass shenanigans that they knew people would gripe about (and apparently declaring multiclassing as optional and telling DM's to "figure it out" was not the free pass they'd hoped it would be, lol) so they made some attempts to shove the genie back into the bottle.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

There was not. But in the beginning of the playtest, those abilities generally scored low. Especially in milticlass combinations prof bonus per day was seen as problematic.

 

[DEFCON 1]

They probably received enough notification via the surveys that it was only a small, select group of players who were all bent out of shape about Short Rests, while most of the rest of the playerbase had no problems with them whatsoever. So getting rid of most Short Rest abilities and moving them all to Proficiency Bonus Per Day was not actually necessary.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I think it was due to multiclassing- if you go back to an early playtest, the playtest Cleric had this channel divinity style power that had it's uses tied to proficiency bonus per day and scaled based on proficiency bonus- so any character could dip Cleric 1 to get this feature and have it scale for them the same way it did for a full Cleric.

This is fine for racial abilities that are meant to scale in that fashion, but they apparently felt that for class abilities, this might open the door for multiclass shenanigans that they knew people would gripe about (and apparently declaring multiclassing as optional and telling DM's to "figure it out" was not the free pass they'd hoped it would be, lol) so they made some attempts to shove the genie back into the bottle.

while i am not a huge fan of multiclassing itself i think it's interaction with PB/LR is actually one of the better things to come from it, letting abilities scale and remain relevant with your growing character even if you never took another level of your dipped class.

edit: just because i only have one level in a specific class that doesn't inherently make my character a level one adventurer, my character's abilities should reflect that even if i only dabbled in something there's still a level of mastery that comes from long experience.

 

[payn]

I wish this was a module we could switch up to. Oh wait.. where are the modules they talked about in NEXT???

 

[James Gasik]

Which is sad because I think the idea of saying "hey, you got this cool thing that you can only use once, unless you take an hour long nap while on safari to deepest, darkest Chult" is a bit nonsensical. And notice how some classes, like the Warlock, have a way to recover things outside of a short rest because they know it's not always tenable, lol.

 

[Nikosandros]

I think it was due to multiclassing-

Unpopular opinion: multiclassing is a curse upon the game. The necessity to balance around it severely constrains game design and not in a good way.

 

[payn]

Unpopular opinion: multiclassing is a curse upon the game. The necessity to balance around it severely constrains game design and not in a good way.